With literally hundreds upon hundreds of exclusive film and television titles releasing on an annual basis, any Netflix original worth its salt needs to be of the highest quality in order to endure. While 2017’s What Happened to Monday technically doesn’t tick all of the required boxes, it doesn’t deserve to be entirely forgotten, either.
If you want to split hairs, then it isn’t really an in-house project at all, or at least not on a global scale. Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters and Dead Snow director Tommy Wirkola’s sci-fi thriller scored a theatrical release in many international markets, where it did an impressive turn by recouping its $20 million and then some.
Bolstered by a stellar performance from Noomi Rapace – as well as typically strong support from Willem Dafoe and Glenn Close – the dystopian adventure unfolds in a future where population limits have been set, leading Rapace and her sisters to try and combine seven lives into one existence in order to stay out of the spotlight of the shady officials keeping tabs on the numbers.
Of course, things go awry when one of their number goes missing, leading to a frantic chase that puts them all at risk. It might not be the best of Netflix’s contributions to the well-worn genre, but it’s a million miles off being the worst. Then again, perhaps subscribers have been turned onto the charms of What Happened to Monday all over again, with FlixPatrol naming it as one of the platform’s most-watched titles once again, close to six years after its initial release
